The ShanghaiTech Symposium on Informaiton Science and Technology 2016 (SSIST’2016) was held successfully from June 23 to 25, 2016, at Parkyard Hotel, Shanghai.
SSIST 2016 focused on three topics: Robotics, Virtual Reality, and Computing Theory and Systems. The Symposium featured some of the most exciting developments in robotics such as unmanned helicopters and cars as well as the revolutionary virtual reality technologies.
SSIST is an international forum that features fundamental research developments and groundbreaking technologies in the areas of electrical engineering, computer sciences, and computational mathematics. Each year, the Symposium invites some of the most renowned researchers in the world from both academia and industry to present their latest research work and to discuss future research directions. The Symposium aims to bring the state of the art research and industrial technologies to young faculty and graduate students in China, especially in the neighboring areas of Shanghai. The symposium attracted over 800 attendees in the three days including faculty members, researchers, and students.

The six keynote speakers, Shankar Sastry, Dean and Roy W. Carlson Professor of Engineering, University of California, Berkley; Andrew Chi-Chih Yao, Dean & Professor of the Institute of Interdisciplinary Information Sciences, Tsinghua University; Vijay Kumar, Nemirovsky Family Dean; Zexiang Li, Professor of the Department of the Electrical and Electronic Engineering School of Engineering ,HKUST; Raja Koduri, Senior Vice President of AMD and Wolfram Burgard, Professor of Freiburg University, gave excellent speeches of their research fields.
The invited speakers were from HTC Facebook, IBM, Caltech, Standford, Shanghai Jiaotong University and Tsinghua University and other well-known enterprises and universities.

As an important part of SSIST’2016, a tutorial on June 23 was focused on computer systems and 3D reconstruction. The tutorial speakers were professors from Tsinghua, CAS and Virginia University. All speakers gave easy-to-follow tutorials, which were well accepted by all attendees. The tutorials were different from the normal academic lectures and the symposium speakers explained the abstract theory and formulas in a vivid way.
President Yin Jie gave opening remarks to the symposium (June 24& 25) followed by keynote speeches of Shankar Sastry and Zexiang Li.
The speakers and the audience had an active interaction during the Q&A session, which gained rounds of warm applauses.

A panel discussion on the last conference day targeted at “The World We Are Building Tomorrow” and was hosted by Zheng Zhang from Shanghai Newyork University. The panelist includes Jerry Chen from Facebook, Chen Weidong from SJTU and Yi Ma & Jingyi Yu from ShanghaiTech. The panelists challenged each other about the “The good, bad and ugly that your research will be used/misused?”, which brought the symposium to a climax.

The symposium was closed by Yi Ma’s speech to all the attendees: he sincerely hopes that more and more talents will join ShanghaiTech to build a high-standard research university in the near future.